CAROLYN SAVIDGE     ARTIST’S STATEMENT      2026 Agora

 

On a farm I started: balanced on a gate at garden’s end, lost in a dancing vision. And as time passed, the dream became real: a life in dance, from a love of nature’s gifts to stage – worldwide dance and teaching, Barbados Dance Theatre, Laban, Martha Graham, Limon, Isadora Duncan, Ballet, Afro Caribbean artists, icons shaping my world to inform, to create for stage and film.

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Then the final curtain call (two children now). Second husband’s slow, painful decease. I bowed and left the stage, began to search. I saw grief, and myself, the world through a new lens. So it continued, the only boundaries now? Time.

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Ten years pass since emerging from the last stage door. I used to dance. Now it’s done, yet creation is in me.

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Intuition drives me as it once made the dance, darkness along the way. I’m germinating, curating expressions in vessels, seeding works.

Thoughts not always pretty as truths unravel with clay and found objects. All death and decay, skulls, dried vegetation, patterns in landscapes, intrigue. And my thinning, falling, hair.

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More grief and pain: three wedding dresses now hang on wardrobe rails, mere fodder for the moths. I close the door on marriage.

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Materials embody a stitched and layered-up life. A miscellany gathered from dusty cupboards echoes feelings, senses, memories.

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My mind is whispering. Is this the truth?

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Surprise in hand and heart, glimpsed in eyes who wonder at my body of work. The sound of love and laughter rings, an essence of change.

Grandchildren rush in.

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But still, I balance on the farm gate, musing, laughing at old age, the need to create burning bright on my horizon. A following wind still shapes the passion – a passion to form, and inform, as form informs the process.

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Carolyn Savidge 2026